Monday, May 23, 2011

Kodak Looses It's Edge In Printer Wars

Kodak states that they offer the lowest printer ink replacement costs in the industry. Well that has become a slight of hand move at this point as their costs on ink have risen considerably over the past 6 months and continues to rise on a regular basis. Yes the cost of their ink is still slightly lower than their main competitor, HP, but only by a couple of dollars. Why we say that it's slight of hand is because you can buy a comparable HP printer that will produce better quality prints for much less money than a Kodak. The cost difference more than offsets the difference in ink costs between the two companies. We have been using Kodak printers for the past three years exclusively. Prior to that, we used mainly HP printers and have used printers from all of the manufacturers with the exception of Brother. HP has always won our picture print wars in the most stringent tests even comparing their prints to Kodak and Fuji photo labs. HP has either won or tide against Fuji photo labs but always beat everyone else. (We still maintain all our prints from our public tests). We have never found Epson to win any test and Canon is a great competitor but their costs are still to high and we do not like their deceiving Green advertising.

Grant you, we have real issues with Kodak, we have had very bad experiences with their customer service and consider it worthless. We like their top end point and shoot camera's but find the competition to produce better products. We still own Kodak's first printer made for the recent industry wars but it no longer works that well. We are actually on our third printer from Kodak and the quality overall is average. The prints are outstanding, it's the durability that comes into play. We still have numerous HP printers that still work as well as the day we bought them 5 years ago. As you can see, we are unable to say this about Kodak printers. Our next printer? Sorry Kodak, we are back to HP. Our next top end point and shoot? Canon is the clear winner for us. Even in the camera wars, at some point we have owned them all. Our choices are Canon, Fuji and Nikon. We will give Sony camera's their due, but they do not lend themselves to what we demand. Just about all cameras are made in China except Canon. At least the top end Canon's are still made in Japan with top notch manufacturing that you can count on.